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Rented Housing

As a member of the Select Committee, I welcome the report, and agree with it. As has been said, we took an awful lot of evidence and made many visits throughout the country to ensure that the report was factually based on people's experience in their daily lives and the struggle that many of them have in achieving their goal of becoming a tenant with affordable, social housing. As my hon. Friend the Member for Islington, South and Finsbury (Emily Thornberry) said, the problem is more acute in London than elsewhere, but that does not mean that it is not acute elsewhere. Certainly, in Sheffield, the change over the years in the shortage of available rented housing is only too obvious for anyone to see, particularly Members of Parliament at their surgeries. I agree with my hon. Friend that one's heart almost sinks when someone comes in with a housing problem, because one simply does not know where to begin to help them, and often cannot do so because they are one of a number of people in real need trying to access an increasingly short supply of rented housing. The Committee rightly agreed with the overall target of building 3 million new homes by 2020, and increasing the number of social rented homes that are built each year to 50,000. Eventually, we may have to increase those figures further, but they seem to be a good starting point in support of the Government's targets. The hon. Member for Chesterfield (Paul Holmes) commented on the shortage of available property in his constituency. I asked Sheffield Homes, the ALMO that covers most of the rented stock in my constituency, to provide some figures for last year. I asked for the figures for three-bedroom family houses because, as a result of the right to buy, there is a disproportionate number of flats compared with houses in the housing stock, because, by and large, the houses have been sold. The figures, which excluded allocations to homeless families and people whose homes had been demolished—there is a demolition programme in south Sheffield for system-built properties from the 1970s which are no longer fit for purpose—showed that there were only three allocations from the waiting list to people wanting three-bedroom family homes in the whole of my constituency last year. I receive more requests for help from people wanting such accommodation in a month than is available in a year, and I accept that I see only the tip of the iceberg. It is right for the Government to respond to the current housing pressures, which came after the report was produced. Part of the £2 billion package of help for the housing market may be used by councils to buy vacant property in the private sector for social letting, or to start building new homes. The Government must quickly rethink that package, welcome as it was, because, as we have heard, there is evidence that some housing associations are having problems in getting their schemes under way for the simple reason that they rely on packages of funding, some of which are used to build houses for sale. That helps to cross-subsidise rented properties. As the value of houses for sale has fallen—and selling them may be a problem—they will find it difficult to raise funding to get those packages away. Some of them are having problems because of the lack of funds in the wholesale market anyway. At the same time, private sector schemes throughout the country are not starting—work has stopped on schemes in the Darnall area of my constituency—and if they have section 106 agreements, the houses covered by those agreements will not be built either. It is likely that there will be a fall in the number of housing association properties being built, and the Government must address the issue urgently. It is right that housing associations and local authorities should be able to access money through the package to build more homes, but if fewer homes are being built under other financial arrangements, the Government may have to step in quickly and increase the available funding. The enormous pressures on social housing that we are already experiencing, and the fact that many people who wanted to buy in the private sector as first-time buyers cannot now access mortgages because of the requirement for larger deposits, produce additional pressure, because tenants cannot move out of social housing and owner-occupiers who want to move into social housing cannot do so because the option of owner-occupation has been postponed, at least for the time being. The Government must ask local authorities what they are doing to access funds that have been made available. Many local authorities do not recognise the need, or they lack the systems, to buy up empty properties, which is a fairly quick way of providing extra social housing. I do not see much evidence of local authorities getting their act into gear to access funding for that purpose, or stimulating their ALMOs or housing associations to do so. It will be interesting to hear whether my right hon. Friend the Minister has any figures to show how much of that money has been spent on the purchase of vacant properties.